Yes, We Have No Plan

Look at any website for a town hall in Mallorca and you will find that they all have a councillor who is responsible for fiestas. This is not a sole responsibility, but responsibility there nevertheless is. Fiestas (and indeed fairs) represent one of the strongest statements as to what a town (or parts of towns) is all about. It is local culture in the form of a party. It would be odd were there not a councillor who was charged with looking after this culture.

The demands placed on such a councillor will vary enormously depending on the size of any given municipality, but even in the smaller towns there is more to it than simply ensuring that the pipers turn up at the appointed time (preferably with their pipes) and that DJ Deejay has remembered his USB sticks that will whisk the partygoers back to the good old days of the 1980s. The fiesta needs organising. It needs planning. The plan may not vary greatly from year to year, but that doesn't mean it can be neglected.

Palma town hall has admitted that it doesn't have a plan for fiestas. It is an extraordinary admission. If there is one municipality on Mallorca you would think would most definitely have a plan - and a pretty detailed one, too - then Palma would be that municipality. Alas, it does not.

The confession that there is no plan has come in the aftermath of what, by general consensus, was the worst Sant Sebastià fiesta since it was given its current-day look at the end of the 1970s. Even the town hall seems to accept that the 2015 edition was a bit of a washout. It wasn't only attributable to the weather; the music events for the "revetla", the grand party for the eve of Sant Sebastià, reached an all-time low.

Perhaps even more extraordinary is that Esperanza Crespí, the councillor for citizen participation, has not only admitted that there is no plan she has also accepted, amidst apologies for this year's fiesta, that a proposal from the PSOE opposition last year for there to be a plan was not followed up. She has said that she didn't know what PSOE was suggesting but would have liked to have done. Maybe she should have asked them for more detail then.

That Esperanza even has responsibility for fiestas might seem a little surprising. She heads an area within the council that combines citizen participation with commerce, work and youth. Fiestas fall somewhere within this lot. Forget what I was saying about fiestas and local culture. Palma has a councillor for culture and sport who doesn't have responsibility for fiestas.

It is possible, therefore, that this is part of the problem. Fiestas, in the grand scheme of things in a city which has as much on its plate as Palma does, are far from being a number-one priority and so may fall down some black hole of organisational structure. Or they may be assigned wrongly; if not the councillor for culture and sports, then maybe the one for tourism and what is called municipal co-ordination should take care of fiestas.

Wearing her participation hat, Esperanza has said that the time may have come for the town hall to sit down with residents, business associations and others and discuss fiestas. Yes, it probably is time and probably should have been happening anyway: principles of participation appear to be developed slowly in Palma.

To make matters worse, the Més grouping at the town hall has been calling for Esperanza's head because other fiesta activities have been prohibited - three demons' fire-runs, for instance, one of them in Son Sardina. And then there was all the fuss over the town hall's apparent indifference to this year's alternative Sant Sebastià fiesta, Sant Kanut. Despite the fact that Kanut is not an official fiesta, the town hall now seems to accept that they got things terribly wrong. Citizens participating in staging their own fiestas has rapidly become an accepted wisdom at the council; Kanut will happen next year and do so over three days. Sounds like a plan.

The sadness is of course that Sant Sebastià should be a major event in the Mallorcan calendar and should be promoted more strongly. The need for promotion  on an international level was accepted some years ago at the time when a version of ELO and Echo and the Bunnymen were coming to Palma. Crisis took over, but critics of the town hall say that it is no longer enough to just blame a cut to financing for the fiesta having gone into decline. Meanwhile, one wonders what all the sponsors of Palma 365 make of the situation. In terms of winter promotion of the city, it doesn't get much better than a dazzling fiesta in January. Time to get planning.